Nerdy Pursuits
Sunday, May 20, 2007
This week was all about nerdy pursuits, or bookish fantasies to be exact.
On Monday, I went down to school to collect some stuff and passed by the co-op (er it's the NUS bookshop, if you didn't already know). But of course, me being me, I didn't exactly just pass by, I went right in and stopped short at a big (well maybe it wasn't so big after all on hindsight) red sign and felt arrested by the word "sale" in black bold letters.
Hur hur. So that left me scurrying around the cramped area, quickly feasting on what kind of books were on sale. And mind you, these books were old new, new no doubt in terms of having not been used before, and old meaning the pages were definitely yellowed, like those books you put in the sun for too long and you realise at the end of some time that they have acquired a nasty old-ish yellow look. Nevertheless that didn't stop me. I mean, the books were like dirt cheap, and by that I mean the prices ranged from 1 buck to perhaps 10 bucks, but the average was around 3 to 5 bucks.
Oh the pain of not having a truck to hoard all of them and carry them safely back into my own nice brown bookshelves!
Anyway I stood there for what seemed like hours (er which I probably did and wouldn't be surprised LOL), no doubt attracting stares from the cashier at the comics counter adjacent to my precious stash of old new books. And finally, I emerged, rather triumphantly if I may add, with 4 nice fat books (3 sci-fi fiction and 1 non-fiction) totalling a *gasp* grand total of 15 bucks. I never thought I would be this good at saving money.
(Obviously, if you've managed to read until here and haven't already realised yet, I'm telling you this so you can have a go charging at those books as well)
Of course, I won't be able to keep this enthusiasm to myself for long, I mean, I had to resist the urge to like call a million other people whom I thought might be interested in the sci-fi books that I was picking up. Until I realised that maybe they would be too busy doing more important things like having jobs and studying than getting excited about buying books on sale.
So this is what happened on Friday, when I revisited the co-op: I nudged Mandy in the direction of the big red "sale" sign and of course, needless to say, she went bonkers. An example would be like: "Oh my God!" to the first book and then the addiction began, which proceeded with the obsessive flipping of every single book in the stash. And after that one round of flipping, there was a second and a third and a... well you get the gist right, I mean, do I have to go on spelling the numbers? Ok and after all that flipping, there was of course the selection. And by selection, I mean selecting the books that we would actually buy from a stack of books that we thought we could potentially buy LOL.
Nerdy pursuits generally are not just expensive, they are also physical hard labour you know. After this round of selection, there is what I call the "finer selection", in which we pick the nicest, most decent-looking paperback from the whole stack of nearly identical books bearing the same title. After this is the purchasing bit but of course, you never know when nerdy pursuits can become circular in nature. After all, just waiting for your friend to finish choosing can be a great tendency for your roving eyes to wander over to another book or books.
And so, Mandy managed to procure 3 fiction novels for a mere 11 bucks. She practically looked like she had won a prize or something.
Now we have come to the last of the nerdy pursuits: how else to end the week but with storewide discounts at a major leading bookstore like Kinokuniya? Yup, needless to say, I went in sniffing around the books. Oh for the love of their new-ish scent! Each time I go in there during a sale, I will emerge with a few books at hand and another few thousand to go on my mental list of "wanted books," with of course the frustration at my poor little purse not only because it was already bleeding red from the purchase, but more so because there just wasn't enough for "that other special book I've always wanted to get" (which of course is neverending, if you get the drift).
Nonetheless, I surfaced from the numerous books and rows of bookshelves victorious (again! Ah-ha!), having gotten 5 various books for 50 bucks. Even though it burnt a hole in my pocket, I was never more ready to part with my money. Nope, I'm not a fool, not even close. Books can't feed me physically but at least it can feed my soul.
Yes, I am proud of my bookish fantasies. Every time I saved some, albeit sometimes puny, amount of money, I would feel on top of the world, sometimes like I had conquered the world even, just a little short of punching my fist in the air and shouting "YES!!" In fact, I would even venture to boast about my purchases, like others do about discounts on clothes, except probably not everybody will understand this obsession when it comes to books. Like: "you mean that boring little rectangular thing with 500 odd pages that just goes on and on without any hints of pictures in them?" *Nods fervently with conviction*
My reply to such things?
"I would like to devour them as fast as I can so there will be time for other books."
11:22 pm
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